Her funeral is next Wednesday. It is already causing all kinds of criticisms and concerns. Yet one fact in particular seems to be passing many people by here in the UK. Here we have a politician who was utterly individualist. Indeed, she openly poured scorn on anyone who was minded to turn to the state for help. As she once argued in an interview with ‘Women’s Own’ magazine in the late 1980s -"…too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it's the government's job to cope with it. 'I have a problem, I'll get a grant.' 'I'm homeless, the government must house me.' They're casting their problem on society.”

These days, we can add another proposition to Mrs Thatcher’s original 1987 list - ‘We have a problem, we can’t (or won’t) pay for her funeral. The state must pay up.’ This, at any rate, is the attitude of the Thatcher family. Most of the funeral cost is to fall to the state, despite Mrs Thatcher herself being a multimillionaire. The Guardian newspaper estimates that her funeral “…will be the most expensive in British history.” Most expensive that is, for any commoner. Perhaps as much as £10 million. So there we have it. The most outspoken, free-market individualist ever to grace Parliament, now depends for her own burial, upon the very institution she despised. If draining the state of £10 million is not ‘casting her problem on society’, especially in these times of economic austerity, then I’m an uncle to the proverbial monkey. Yet such hypocrisy seems to bother virtually no one in Britain.

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